My blanket response to anyone who complains about coaches salaries is typically “if you get 60K people to pay hundreds/thousands of dollars a year to hear a professor lecture 7 Saturdays a year, there isn’t a university in this country that wouldn’t pay him or her the same as they pay their football coach,” but that kind of goes out the water when you see what schools like SDSU that have little-to-no chance of making a BCS bowl pay coaches that ended up being total failures.

Another problem is that too many people don’t realize that the actualstate salaries of most football coaches, especially at BCS schools, isn’t much higher than what the business school’s dean makes and typically lower than what the president of the school makes. Yet Houston Nutt is somehow at fault b/c the private fundraising arm of the University coupled with his other sources of income combine to pay him ~$2.2m a year on top of the ~250K he makes from the state?

Personally, I hope Chuck Long gets every cent he’s owed per the parameters of his contract with SDSU and whatever other entities were paying him his 700K+/yr. Why should he settle for less? They should have known that they have absolutely no chance of winning their conference much less recruiting battles with other CA and AZ schools long before they signed a coach with no HC experience to such a contract.

Off the soapbox now…

I actually don’t disagree with your points… certainly Les Miles earns his keep in terms of bringing cash to LSU (no Les Miles, and there’s a good chance there’d be no big SEC TV contract). But at a time when faculty and staff are taking furloughs and layoffs (including biz school deans etc.) it seems to me that the athletic staff ought to pitch in too.